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We’d been at the new house farm for about a month and it was time to start building things. My 3d-printer is still in the garage, my oscilloscope and half of my electronics tools are still in some mystery unlabeled box. Although I do know where my auto-bbq is. Of course it’s 105 degrees outside right now, so I don’t really want to spend 16 hours smoking a pig shoulder. Quite frankly, right now we don’t really need fancy 3d printed parts, or motion sensors. (I’m sure later on I’ll have plenty of need for a coyote perimeter sensors, powered by an arduino, scavenged op amps and lots of electrical tape when I run out of solder) Did I mention we have road runners on the property too? I’ve watched enough cartoons to know that road runner will beat the coyotes every single time.

My parents had graciously bought us a small greenhouse kit which we’ve slated to be our first small aquaponics setup. It’s going to be a while before it’s fully operational. Actually it’s going to be a while before it’s even partially operational, but I won’t let that stop us. So on Saturday we started to put together the greenhouse. The instructions said it would take 2 people about 8 hours, and they weren’t kidding. Despite a rather large number and variety of parts, putting it together wasn’t too bad. The only hard part was lining up the triangular panels where the walls meet the roof on the front and back. I think Liz and I will need marriage counseling after that part of the assembly 🙂

Being in software for a living, I sometimes forget that if you start off in the wrong order, you can’t just go back and re-write some stuff. Here is the point where we realized the “fish tanks” are not going to make it through the doors:

But at this point, everything was out of the box, like aluminum pick up sticks. We weren’t picking up the fish tanks till the next day, and besides I needed to at least bury the sump tank, so we pressed on ahead. I’m not sure if we’ll just pick the greenhouse up and lift it over our tanks later, or maybe partially disassemble it. But we’ll make it work somehow. Anyway, we pressed onwards and finished building the greenhouse. It felt good to have our first structure on the land we built ourselves. There are many more to come, and most of them won’t come with a kit.